Melbourne wins priority in domain name draw

The City of Melbourne has come out ahead in an international lottery to determine the order in which some 1930 applications for new generic top-level domains will be processed.

International domain name regulator ICANN today conducted a “prioritisation draw” as part of its move to introduce gTLDs beyond the familiar .com, .net and .org.

In a bid to promote a global internet, ICANN prioritised internationalised domain names (IDN) in the lottery, assigning the first 116 places to gTLD applications involving non-Latin characters.

The Vatican’s application to register .catholic in Chinese characters won the top spot, followed by Amazon’s .store in Japanese and International Domain Registry’s .web in Arabic.

Insurance comparison service provider iSelect was the first Australian organisation to emerge from the ICANN’s lottery barrel, with its application for .select set to be the 173rd gTLD application to be evaluated.

The City of Melbourne was the seventh of 66 applicant cities to emerge from the barrel, ranking 350th in the draw.

German city Koeln was the first city to be drawn, winning the rank of 126, while the City of Sydney placed 1352nd.

ARI Registry, which was contracted by the Victorian and NSW Governments to register .melbourne, .victoria and .sydney this February, said the 1002-place gap in the cities’ rankings could account for a six- to 12-month difference in implementation.

Other Australian applications in the top 500 included Monash University’s .monash at 338, Open Universities Australia’s .study at 349 and the Commonwealth Bank’s .cba at 378.

Three of Australia’s big four banks applied to register gTLD strings. NAB’s .ubank and .nab came in at 783 and 984 respectively, while the ANZ Group’s .anz took the 1382nd spot.

ARI Registry chief executive officer Adrian Kinderis said rankings would give some gTLDs a first-mover advantage over others, highlighting potential competition between .film and .movie as examples.

Some applicants made an event of today’s ten-hour draw, with registrar Uniregistry hiring someone to dress up as Santa for the six hours until its .christmas application was drawn.

Thirty-two Australian organisations have applied to register a total of 40 domains in Round 1 of ICANN’s gTLD program.

The next round of the program is due to commence after the current round. Industry players expect it to take another three years before Round 2 applications are accepted.

Australian applicants have drawn the following priority rankings (pdf):